Newman Huo

THROUGH his peculiar paintings, Danish painter Michael Kvium says he intends “to create a space for communication with audiences,” and he particularly wants to see how Chinese audiences would react when entering his special art space.

About 80 paintings by Kvium, most of which are on loan from public museums and private galleries or collectors in Europe, are on display in Guan Shanyue Art Museum during the Spring Festival holidays.

Two of Kvium’s representative paintings, titled “A Gift of Nature” and “God’s Strategy,” are on show in the exhibition. Other important works on display include the series works titled “Art-Me,” “Domestic Scene,” “As Domestic as Milk and Oil,” as well as some landscape paintings and portrait paintings.

Two years in preparation, this is Kvium’s first art exhibition in China. Following the first stop in Shenzhen, the exhibition will move to Beijing and Shanghai.

“The art show in China is important for me because it can not only show Chinese audiences what I think with my art, but also provide me with an opportunity to meet Chinese artists and to learn similarities and differences between us,” Kvium said in an interview last week.

“I’m very curious about how Chinese audiences and artists would respond to my works, and their responses will probably give me some new incentives for my creations in future.”

This has been Kvium’s third trip to Shenzhen since 2006. He was invited to display two of his ink paintings at the Fifth International Ink Painting Biennale of Shenzhen in December last year.

Born in Horsens, Denmark in 1955, Michael Kvium is one of the most influential and significant painters in Europe today.

While still a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1979 through 1985, he began to consider finding a new way to develop his own style, which would be different from the trend of modernism of the day.

“Since figure paintings have been neglected in the European art scene for so many years, I decided to again introduce humans to my works and do figure paintings,” Kvium said. “I tried to explain how the world looks and how we think after modernism.”

He started with the naturalist style, which was not achieved with photographs or models but merely from memory.

In developing his own art language, he found inspirations in the art styles of Spanish artists Goya, Velasquez and the Spanish Baroque, which have formed a long tradition of attempts to combine supernatural elements with daily life to unveil the pathetic fate of human beings, with intense and grotesque fantasies.

Kvium’s own attempts at art did not achieve immediate success. He had to do all kinds of jobs to support his family after he left college. In collaboration with a group of performance artists, he made a 10-minute movie, a 90-minute feature movie and an eight-hour silent movie in 1986.

About five years later, around 1990, Kvium’s efforts at painting began to be rewarded. He began to sell his paintings after they were accepted by art critics and collectors in Europe.

“In my paintings, I’ve touched on things we know about, but we don’t like to talk about,” he said.

He has worked his way into areas that normally lie hidden behind the events of daily life. The themes he has taken up over the years are taboos in society, either sexuality or the way people treat the world. The goal of his art is to expose and visualize the fathomless states of the human mind, where the dark side particularly interests him.

His works, which describe things like deviant sexuality, callousness, and even the absence of the right to exist, provoke a powerful emotional response in audiences, often leading to disgust. But at the same time, they find these motives very fascinating.

Kvium classifies his work into three categories: catharsis, the Greek word for purification, pathology, and osmosis, the Greek word signifying the movement of fluid through porous membrane.

The catharsis group includes all paintings depicting one or more persons in absurd situations or in the process of performing grotesque acts. In contrast, pathology pictures show dissection of the human body, presented as fragments or as a pathological state.

The osmosis group evokes a primeval state or perhaps a horrifying vision of the figure, in any case one that is devoid of man and out of control, which can be located in the macrocosm or microcosm.

Throughout the 1990s, with Kvium’s works widely accepted, a lot of painters and sculptors around the world began to explore similar themes. “In recent years, I tried to make paintings without humans, only a few elements of nature,” Kvium said.

Sitting alone in his workshop in Copenhagen, he has finished many landscape paintings from memory.